Islamutopia: A very short history of political Islam
此文作者是亞非學院(SOAS)的老師，是我研究伊朗近代史台灣朋友的碩班指導教授。這篇文章簡要介紹政治伊斯蘭(Political Islam)歷史，修正傳統學術圈對政治伊斯蘭的認知。其中ㄧ段句子與我的研究方法很接近，證明該研究方法是可行的。
「知識份子通常不會將伊斯蘭視為研究題材，因為這代表是與社會科學的妥協。很少學者在國關學科（IR）領域接受伊斯蘭是有效的分析單位。這種偏見顯示了以歐洲為中心論的研究取向，滲入許多大學課程中。」
「名嘴在主流媒體的言論，將政治伊斯蘭詮釋為難以理解、妖魔化與誇大的現象。這種對伊斯蘭政治的詮釋無法使我們理解西亞與北非現在正發生了什麼。」
This article is an introduction
to a special series of posts commissioned by LSE IDEAS exploring Islamism and the Arab Spring. The
series also includes articles on Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, with a concluding
post on the geostrategic implications of the Islamist moment following the Arab
Spring. These articles will be published on the site over the coming weeks.
By Arshin Adib-Moghaddam
Intellectuals have been generally uncomfortable engaging with
Islam as a subject matter, lest they would compromise
the secular dictum of the social sciences. Few in
burgeoning disciplines such as International Relations (IR) would accept that
belief systems such as Islam are valid units of analysis. This bias reveals a distinctly Eurocentric
orthodoxy that permeates the curricula of many of our universities. Yet a secular analysis of political discourses of Islam, systematic
ideational inventions that use Islamic symbols, norms, metaphors, and imagery
for ideological and political purposes, is very necessary to understand the trajectories
of Muslim-majority societies. We are currently witnessing the birth of what I
have called a post-modernised Islam, an eclectic experimentation, new
interpretations being tried, and new forms of legislations being experimented
with, all within a discursive field claimed to be authentically ‘Islamic.’ And
yet in most interpretations of what is happening, from the opinion pieces of
pundits in the mainstream media, to recent novels and movies, Islam as politics
is either trivialised and occulted or demonised and exaggerated. As such the meanings of Islamic politics are disguised to the detriment
of our understanding of what is happening in West Asia and North Africa at the
very moment I am writing these lines.
It was a feature of the modernist precursor of the current
experiment in the late 19th century that it yielded extraordinarily new forms
of Islamic thinking even as it failed to deliver politically the utopia of a
pan-Islamic renaissance. Abduh and
Afghani re-opened the gates of ijtihad, or independent reasoning, questioning
the orthodoxy of the clergy and the anti-philosophical leanings of the most
prominent Islamic institutions, including al-Azhar in Cairo
in the case of Abduh, and the Shia seminaries in the case of al-Afghani. Their
discourse was pregnant with an ‘Avicennian Islam’, imbued with the dialectical
musings of the classical Islamic philosophers, doyens of political thought such
as Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd and Ibn Khaldun. And yet
in Abduh and Afghani we also find the beginnings of something else, traces of
the violent ruptures of modernity exemplified by their emphasis on the
ideological merit of Islam- Islam din va dawla, Islam as religion and
governance. It is the promise of this Islamutopia, not merely
a desire to conquer the state that motivates many rank and file Islamists to
venture into the realm of Machiavellian politics in many ways until today.
The decline of the Caliphate in 1924 and
the emergence of authoritarian, militarised and semi-dependent post-colonial
states was a caesura so traumatic that even today’s politics, Islamist and
other, continue to be affected. It is not too far-fetched to generalise that
for the modernist Islamists from Abduh to Khomeini, Qutb to Mawdudi, al-Banna
to Iqbal, Islam was the answer to the social, political, economic and cultural
decline of the ummah. These modernist Islamists
invented many Islams. They were assembled to be suitable enough to function in
the modernist mode, as agendas for socio-economic
organisation, governance, cultural policies, or in the case of a famous fatwa
of Ayatollah Khomeini to provide jurisprudential cover for transsexual surgery.
Moreover, opening up the gates of ijtihad
de-monopolised the authority of the orthodox clergy.
Suddenly, lay men such as Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949) and Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), the founders of the Ikhwan in Egypt, proclaimed an
authentic Islam that would transgress the interpretation of the clergy
questioning their institutionalised power and sovereignty. Likewise,
Ali Shariati (b. 1933) in Iran and Mohammad
Iqbal (1877-1938) in the sub-continent deemed
their poetics of politics intellectually superior to the prevalent clerical
jurisprudence. Centuries of tafsir, the interpretation of the Quran, and fiqh
or Islamic jurisprudence were superseded by the necessities of the politics of
the day which required formulations of Islam that were amenable to ideological
mobilisation, almost as if Islam is what one makes of it.
Trends in the opposite direction were discernible too. Clerics such as Ayatollah
Khomeini in Iran and Ayatollah
Baqir al-Sadr in Iraq, tried to galvanise the clerical class
into political action in opposition to the quietist tradition in Shia politics.
This was also an effort to close down the epistemic community, to monopolise authority
in the hands of the clerical class, to control the anarchy of ijtihad that
Abduh and al-Afghani’s intellectual revolution inadvertently brought about.
Modernist Islam had a radical connotation, expressed in what
may be called a ‘Qutbian’ syntax. For Qutb,
Islam ‘is a revolutionary concept and a way of life, which
seeks to change the prevalent social order and remould it according to its own
vision.’ In response to western imperialism and authoritarian states in the
Arab world, Qutbian Islam did away with philosophy in favour of ideology. In a
radical twist of meanings, ‘the word Muslim became the name of an international
revolutionary party that Islam seeks to form in order to put its revolutionary
programme into effect.’ Jihad was not the individual’s spiritual path to God.
In the Qutbian discourse it ‘signifies that revolutionary struggle involving
the utmost use of resources that the Islamist party mobilises in the service of
its cause.’ Islam as revolution; Iran in 1979 experienced it.
The molar shifts from the apostolic, intransigent,
opprobrious postulations of ‘Qutbian Islam’ that were geared to radical change,
if not revolution, to the post-modernised mode is not absolute. Quite
literarily there are residues of modernity in post-modernity. But the context
of politics in the Arab and Islamic world has changed and so has the forms of
political expression and organisation. US hegemony is very
different from British imperialism. There
is no formal control of what is happening in the Arab and Muslim world. The
current leaders of Ennahda in Tunisia and the Ikhwan in Egypt do not have to
fight British and/or French colonialists as Abduh and Afghani felt compelled to
do during the Urabi rebellion in Egypt (1881-1882) and
the Tobacco revolt in Iran (1891) respectively. And
yet, US power, more abstract, clandestine, molar and eclectic (and thus more
difficult to detect), impinges on much that is happening in West Asia and North
Africa.
The second difference between today’s Islams and their
precursors is that they are being nurtured in
functioning civil societies that are well equipped to
articulate civil politics and to disseminate their message in the networked
spaces of the world-wide-web. As
a consequence, current inventions of ‘Islam’ revert to what may be called an
Avicennian ‘realism’ that is characterised by pragmatic politics, quite
contrary to the radical upheaval demanded by people like Mawdudi, Khomeini and
Qutb. If for the latter, Islam was a revolutionary
panacea to western imperialism and tyrannical regimes,
Ghannouchi talks about dialogue, pluralism, democracy and women’s rights, for instance in his first interview when he returned from exile to
Tunisia in 2011 after the successful ouster of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali: ‘There
is no limit to political pluralism other than the condition of rejecting
violence, and giving anyone the right to found the party. There is full
acceptance of the full legal rights of women. ... We recognise that Tunisians
have the freedom to believe in anything, to leave or embrace any faith, as
faith is a personal matter. ... For the Tunisia that we are working towards,
one in which women enjoy equality, people can establish and join any party and
they have the freedom to adopt any faith.’ Islam as Avicennian relativity. Differences
notwithstanding but I think it is this type of post-modernised Islam that fuels
the politics of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, that rules in Turkey in the
form of Erdogan’s AKP, that governs Tunisia and that feeds into the reform
process in Iran and elsewhere in the region too.
In tone and syntax this type of Islam is different from
Muslim politics of the 20th century and the revolutionary Iranian variant. And
yet, the regional impact of the Iranian revolution may be compared to the
political opportunity that the Cuban revolution in 1953 afforded to ‘Latin’
Americans. The emphasis on national independence may have been a symptom for
the future politics of the region but it did not determine the emergence of the
Chavezes, da-Silvas, Moraleses, and Ortegas of this world. So
while the revolution in Iran was a symptom of a potential post-American future
of West Asia and North Africa, the current revolts in the Arab world are geared
to different dynamics. Consequently, they have yielded politics that are less
radical than Iran’s in 1979.
What seems to be certain in all of this, is that the utopia
of Islam, re-imagined by those yearning for it centuries later in the tumults
of their own time, has been cast by generations of Islamists as one of justice,
prosperity and power, animated by spirituality, and by the mythical bravery of
heroic figures. This Islamutopia still irradiates the
politics of the Arab and Muslim world today.
About
the author: Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is Reader
in Comparative Politics and International Relations at the School of Oriental
and African Studies, University of London. He is the author of Iran in World Politics: The Question of the Islamic Republicand The International Politics of the Persian Gulf: A Cultural
Genealogy. Reviewers have likened his most recent work, A Metahistory of the Clash of
Civilisations: Us and Them Beyond Orientalism, to that
of Edward Said and Michel Foucault.
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